This is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order

By John Schwartz

A New York Times correspondent shares his financial successes and mishaps, offering an everyman's guide to straightening out your money once and for all.
 
Money management is one of our most practical survival skills—and also one we've convinced ourselves we're either born with or not. In reality, financial planning can be learned, like anything else. Part financial memoir and part research-based guide to attaining lifelong security, This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order is the book that everyone who has never wanted to read a preachy financial guide has been waiting for.

John Schwartz and his wife, Jeanne, are pre-retirement workers of an economic class well above the poverty line, but well below the one percent. Sharing his own alternately harrowing and hilarious stories—from his brush with financial ruin and bankruptcy in his thirties to his short-lived budgeted diet of cafeteria french fries and gravy—John will walk you through his own journey to financial literacy, which he admittedly started a bit late. He covers everything from investments to retirement and insurance to wills (at fifty-eight, he didn't have one!), medical directives and more. Whether you're a college grad wanting to start out on the right foot or you're approaching retirement age and still wondering what a 401(K) is, This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order will help you become your own best financial adviser.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9780399576829

John Schwartz

Schwartz’s first novel In The Shadow of Babylon rose to the top of Amazon Kindle's Action/Adventure list. KIRKUS Review wrote... “an epoch-spanning thriller. The prose is something to behold... the author deftly weaves the romantic experiences of a pre-historical shepherd into an extended homily in the best page-turner fashion... evocative... lyrical, mystical and shocking... A wonderfully written, provocative novel."John has lived and worked in the USA, Latin America, Asia, Europe and Fiji. He was one of the first American businessmen to enter China after the Cultural Revolution. In the early 1990’s John and his family established a successful English/Chinese language publishing company based in Hong Kong.John’s poetry placed first in the 71st Annual Writers Digest National Writing Competition (2002). His winning eleven-line poem was not about love, broken hearts, or death... it was about a skyscraper in Hong Kong. Robert Pinsky (U.S. Poet Laureate 1997-2000) called John’s writing “... vivid ... gritty ... vigorous.”John will tell you he has lived well, loved often, cried frequently, hated little, cherished the present, ignored regrets, and often lost sight of the desitnation while relishing the trip.Do what they manhood bids thee do,from none but self expect applause.He noblest lives and noblest dieswho makes and keeps his self-made laws.— Richard Francis Burton

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Copyright © 2018 by John Schwartz

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To Jeanne

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

INTRODUCTION

1   THE PROJECT

2   STARTING OUT

3   YOUR INVESTING PRIMER

4   GETTING ADVICE

5   HOUSES

6   BANKRUPTCY

7   THE KIDS

8   MEDICAL DISASTERS

9   DEBT

10   LIFE INSURANCE

11   WRITING A WILL

12   OLDER AGE

13   THE END

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery.

—CHARLES DICKENS, DAVID COPPERFIELD

I AM AN IDIOT.

That, at least, is the impression I get from personal finance websites and magazines and books. They all seem to say I’m doing pretty much everything wrong when it comes to my financial life, basically because I don’t pay that much attention to my finances.

As a journalist, I understand that telling people to doubt themselves is part of the game of newsstand sales and, in the digital age, page views. That’s why You’re doing it wrong is such powerful clickbait. None of us spends much time on a website that affirms our choices and tells us we are in good shape. No parenting magazine could last long if it didn’t suggest that its advice will make a world of difference. This is especially true when it comes to advice about parenting: Our seven-step plan will help you raise a future Ivy Leaguer! Ignore us, and you will end up with a basement-dwelling angry loner who spends his days playing online games and staring dully at porn.

It’s much the same persuasion game when it comes to financial advice: the person giving the advice has to start from the position that you’ll go broke without this help. In publishing, sex may sell, but insecurity sells even better.

In my case, they could be right about my being all wrong. I mean, look at me. I had reached my mid-50s and didn’t have a will. How dumb is that? I had no idea whether the life insurance that I got through my employer was enough to support my family if I got squashed by a bus during my morning run. And I hadn’t given any thought to figuring out whether the money I’d been putting away for retirement had been well invested and would lead my wife, Jeanne, and me to comfort or misery. Living in the now may be great Zen wisdom, but it’s a lousy way to go about planning for retirement.

We all know we need to do these things: to balance our portfolios, to get a will, to make sure our life insurance policies are generous enough to take care of our loved ones if we meet up with that aforementioned bus. Still, we procrastinate, or don’t know what we should do. We’re supposed to buy low and sell high. Or is it buy and hold? We’re supposed to spring into action and refinance our mortgages the moment interest rates drop below, uh—what was that rule of thumb again? We’re supposed to pay down all our loans, except maybe for the loans that have really low rates. Or is it the smallest loans first? And in the middle of all that, we’re supposed to finance the kids’ college educations and deal adroitly with expensive family emergencies.

So over the last year, Jeanne and I embarked on a project: we took a hard look at what a rather heedless financial existence has left undone. I tried to educate myself about the world of finance and investing. Then, with the help of books, friends, and a few professionals, we worked to get our financial life in order. This book is the story of how we got here, what we did, and what we learned along the way.

I realized it was time to get our financial house in order, not because I’m near retirement (I hope not!), but because this reckoning was overdue. We were surely starting later than we should have, but without a time machine, starting now was as good as it was going to get. Better late, than, you know.

Our financial life has not been a straightforward march toward prosperity. We have struggled; for much of our adult lives, Jeanne and I have lived paycheck to paycheck, and we have veered close to financial disaster more times than I’d like to remember. Our late 30s were a nightmare. Jeanne and I lived through a crisis that started when we moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., so that I could take a great job. But a New York real estate slump kept us from being able to sell our apartment, and deadbeat tenants drove us nearly to bankruptcy. We lost the New York place, and the resulting squeeze kept things tight for years after that.

How tight? When I was working at The Washington Post, on the days before payday, my lunch order in the company cafeteria was often french fries with gravy. The mess of carbs, salt, and fat cost less than two bucks, and that filling meal kept me going until I could get home for dinner. And I knew that one solid knock from illness, or a layoff, could have transformed our financial life from tight to devastated.

That didn’t happen, thank goodness. But the ups and downs continued. Things would let up for a while, and the squeeze would set in again. About a year after I’d gotten to The New York Times, an editor predicted that, financially speaking, I was going to crash and burn. He wasn’t my boss, but we both worked for the business section of the paper and had gotten to be friendly. We often rode the same train into the city from Maplewood, New Jersey, and back again.

I know what you make, he said, and I don’t see how you’re going to make it.

He edited personal finance stories and had planned out his own retirement beautifully. He had built up a generous cushion in his retirement plan and could count on a good pension, as well. He lived frugally, driving a beat-up Ford Fiesta that got more than 40 miles per gallon. In the year or so before he retired, he had built a house on Cape Cod and planned to keep up a little freelance editing work for additional income. This cobbler’s children did not go barefoot. It was clear from our conversation, however, that he didn’t understand how Jeanne and I survived from paycheck to paycheck, much less saved for the future. And he was hinting at something even worse: he didn’t think we were going to make it. At all.

And you know what? He wasn’t wrong. We were in trouble. Despite our best efforts to stay within our means, we were spending more than we were making, and our debts were once again adding up.

Result: misery.

So I might seem like the last person in the world you’d want to take financial advice from. After all, we had made bad decisions, and they put us in a hole. It was very hard to climb out.

But we did climb out.

How did we do it? Some of it was luck. Some of it was good choices we made in our 20s. Some of it was, in our confusion and fear, finding people who knew much more than we did and following their advice. And some of it was learning new things and acting on that hard-earned wisdom.

You have probably made some bad decisions, as well. But you can climb out, too. You can find your guides. You can make your own luck.

Sid Richardson, the legendary Texas oilman, liked to say, I’d rather be lucky than smart.¹ In his business, he had seen booms and busts, enriched wildcatters and humbled titans. He knew that it wasn’t necessarily the smartest who thrived. Of course, Richardson was aw-shucks-ing a little; he had enjoyed a share of luck, but he was also damned smart.

That resonates with me. A large portion of my good fortune has been getting jobs and keeping them at companies that had old-fashioned pension plans. I’ve also made some of my luck; keeping those jobs is no small trick, and anyone with sense knows that you can improve your situation through preparation and hard work. If you succeed, good fortune is always part of the picture. Yet fortune favors the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur is supposed to have said.

So this story is also not just about us. (Jeanne and I aren’t that interesting.) Yes, it involves our experiences, and also the process of exploration I’ve gone through in trying to understand and fix our financial situation. That information becomes, for you, the reader, a sort of guide to the financial world and planning for retirement. What I taught myself also turns out to be what you might need to know. What are the foundations of a good retirement account? What the heck is an exchange-traded fund? Should you ever go to one of those free dinners that retirement consultants send invitations for in the mail? And why does money make so many of us so very, very crazy?

The things Jeanne and I did over the course of the year to take charge of our financial life—figuring out life insurance, drawing up our wills, and the rest—I’ve written up in a way that will show you how it’s done. That’s the part where my being a reporter, someone who can take complicated information and make sense of it for readers, comes in handy.

So this is not your standard personal finance guide. It’s more of a hybrid. If you would rather be reading one of those other kinds of financial books on financial planning or getting rich by 40, your local bookstore has long, heavy shelves of them. Many are written by people who have real financial expertise, or at least talk a good game.

Let me admit that I find most of those books impenetrable, teachy, and preachy. Worse, too many of them suffer from their authors’ need to dress up what is, generally, a short list of common-sense investing ideas with gobbledygook and big promises.

This book, by contrast, keeps the advice simple, throws away the cloak of mystery, and blends in our story in ways that we hope can be useful. Without whining.

I wrote This Is the Year for people like us: a little money-phobic, maybe, but willing to learn before it’s too late. There are a lot of us out there. While more than half of Americans fret about whether they will have enough money for retirement, just 39 percent have ever tried to figure out how much they will need, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) Investor Education Foundation, an organization that tracks our money sense.²

So if we’re idiots, we’re not alone. Many people don’t save enough for retirement, or don’t save at all: According to a report by the National Institute on Retirement Security, some 45 percent of working-age households have no retirement account assets, while the overall national median retirement account balance is just $2,500. As the institute put it, the average U.S. working-age household has virtually no retirement savings.³

And that’s preparing for the future; many of us can’t even handle the present! A 2016 report from the Federal Reserve found that 46 percent of Americans couldn’t cover an emergency expense of $400 without borrowing the money (which includes putting it on a credit card) or selling something.⁴

Ideally, anyone reading this book might want to look at what we did and decide to do the smart things—only better, and earlier. I hope that people younger than us will take the lessons directed at them to heart, and end up not having to eat as many lunches of fries and gravy. Or whatever affordable staple millennials eat. Quinoa? Okay, quinoa.

Quinoa is, apparently, a seed and not a grain.

That’s everything I know about quinoa.

---

—

The idea that became this book started with a piece I wrote for The New York Times about retirement planning.⁵ It walked readers through our efforts to figure out where we stood with regard to our financial endgame: how much we’d have to live on once we retired.

The process of writing, I figured, would help me get over my money phobia. After all, I tackle tough topics all the time in the course of my work, especially in my science journalism. So, I thought, why not make it an assignment? If it’s part of my job to learn about my finances, I’m likelier to get over the hump and figure things out.

That led me to pitch the story. I would have a deadline, an obligation to an editor, and (because special sections are considered freelance work at the Times), I’d get paid. All that would provide me with the incentive I’d previously lacked.

This is the way my mind works. I won’t defend it.

The story described my own nervousness when it comes to thinking about finances. The response from readers was surprising—apparently, there are many, many people out there who share my anxiety. One colleague called it frighteningly familiar, and my inbox became a digital confessional for readers who found themselves, uncomfortably, in the same boat. Other readers offered advice: Buy more bonds! Buy fewer bonds! Go jump in a lake! One helpful fellow told me that the answer was to buy a house in a small town in rural France. He had done this, and things were going great for him. I congratulated him. I write back to almost everyone who isn’t really insulting.

That story got passed around. A neighbor, a great guy in his 30s with a couple of kids, told me his father sent him a three-by-five index card, his usual epistolary medium, lauding the piece. Take it to heart, he wrote. Before you know it, you are looking at your ability to keep paying for things during the 2nd half of your life. The neighbor, Brian, noted in an email to me, I have to say, this is one of the longer written notes I have received from my father in the past several years, or maybe ever.

Had we struck a chord? Could we be the wake-up call for other people, whether in their 50s, or 30s, or just about any age this side of retirement? How could we purport to be teachers, after having done so many things wrong? I was drawn to the idea that we might be useful fools, teaching by good choices and by our flawed example.

This is not a unique idea: we all learn from failure as well as success. As poor Jude Fawley, the epic loser of Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, put it, I may do some good before I am dead—be a sort of success as a frightful example of what not to do; and so illustrate a moral story. Our disasters are good for something, if we know enough not to let them go to waste.

This book opens with that first step in the project to get our financial lives in order: taking a hard look at our progress toward funding our retirement. The other chapters present broader areas of personal finance that most of us face—saving for kids’ college, buying and selling homes, dealing with a medical disaster, bankruptcy, debt, getting insurance, and writing a will—along with the experiences that Jeanne and I have had, for better or worse, in facing them.

So, hello, reader! Welcome to the secrets of our failures. (And, yes, our successes.) Jeanne and I, in telling our story, are trying to walk a line here between self-revelation and self-flagellation. I won’t call this story a journey, because the word is overused. But what a long, strange trip it’s been. If we entertain you, that’s great. If you get something useful out of it, even better.

And if our story at times gives you a soul-warming rush of schadenfreude, we don’t mind one bit.

1

THE PROJECT

THIS PROJECT BEGAN with my realization that it was time to finally figure out whether we were going to be comfortable in retirement or miserable.

Going into it, I knew that we were pretty fortunate compared with many Americans. As I’ve said, I have always worked for companies that pay reasonably well and that provide pensions. Those pensions have been fully funded, at least within the legal definition. Those companies have also sponsored retirement plans for employees and encouraged them to build 401(k) accounts with matching contributions, and I have done that. Also, I’ve been able to hold on to jobs over the years in a business that’s seen plenty of layoffs. Our household budgets have been tight, but aside from that ill-fated apartment purchase in our 30s, our family hasn’t suffered the kind of financial setback or catastrophic illness that destroy many a family’s nest egg.

We knew we had something tucked away. But was that something enough? Thanks to the recent sale of a house we had lived in for 15 years, we had some financial breathing room, at least for a while. But I had no idea where we stood in terms of being able to retire someday. I’d all but stopped looking at the envelopes from Vanguard after 2007, when my funds lost about 40 percent of their value—not an outrageous dip in the context of the broader economic crisis and recession, but a searing one for me. As a sometime financial reporter, I knew enough to not sell stocks during a sell-off, so I didn’t compound the damage with a panic sale. Besides, I’ve always found it easy not to do anything; sloth comes naturally to me.

I figured that the accounts had bounced back to some extent, but hadn’t been tracking them closely. And I had no idea how long such funds would last once I stopped getting a paycheck. A gnawing feeling in my gut convinced me at last that this was the year to get our finances together. Maybe past time, if the numbers didn’t come out right. And while I hope to have good years of productive work ahead, I also have to think about retirement and plan for it—to look at whether I’m on the right track, and to begin addressing some of the other issues that I’d been avoiding all these years.

Where to start? With an industry built around retirement planning, I was faced with the paralysis of too much choice and too little knowledge. How do I find a retirement consultant? Those who work on commission might be tempted to sell financial products that increase their incomes, not mine. And those who charge a flat fee might try to keep things quick and easy (for them) to ensure that their time is efficiently used. I had no intention of being a quick hit on somebody’s conveyor belt.

As it happens, the 401(k) accounts I built up at the three publications I have worked for over the last 30 years are all under the same roof, the mutual funds giant Vanguard. That promised to make things relatively easy, and the company offers free counseling from a certified financial planner to clients of employer-sponsored plans who are over 55.

So one evening in January, I made the call to Vanguard’s 800 number. After navigating the voice-command system, I ended up talking to an upbeat guy named Jeff, who told me that I could either set up an appointment for a phone session with one of their certified financial planners, or I could get a more thorough counseling session by first filling out an online questionnaire that would give the planner a more holistic view of my financial picture before our conversation. The result, he said, would be a personalized financial plan.

Filling out the document takes about 45 minutes, he said.

As I hung up, Jeanne, sitting across the living room on the couch, asked, Any luck?

I told her about the 45-minute questionnaire and said, We can fill it out together.

Thrilling, she said.

The very first question stumped me. It asked the age I plan to retire.

Well, see, this is part of the problem. That is precisely the kind of question I’ve been avoiding all these years. Jeanne and I had never discussed it. I love my job—journalism is a career that calls for hard work, but it rarely feels like work. So we were starting with a big, big question. (Jeanne has worked part-time for years, so her decision would have less impact on our retirement picture.)

We knew that Social Security has traditionally kicked in at 62, but that you could earn more if you hold out longer—say, until 66. Medicare begins at 65. And after hunting around online, it appeared that sticking with gainful employment until 70 would lead to the biggest Social Security benefit. Jeanne, a pragmatist, noted ominously, Your retirement isn’t under your control, entirely. My employer has a lot to say about it. But we could project a best case, and decided that sticking it out to 70 would be the likeliest course to set us up in terms of our investments, Social Security, and pensions. Besides, even if I got booted out of one job, I could probably still find a way to keep earning; many of my friends at the Times had moved on to fulfilling careers on the outside. Seventy it would be.

Okay. So we had an answer! Success!

So that was question number one? Jeanne asked. Yes, I said.

She laughed. That was more than 45 minutes.

Okay, it was going to be a long night. The first answer had taken so long that the Vanguard website had logged me out for inactivity. I went back in, entered the answer. And soon came to an ever more difficult question: How long do you expect to live?

Well, holy guacamole. Let me check my appointment book! We had moved abruptly from economics to metaphysics, or at least actuarial science.

Here, too, however, we decided to plan for a good outcome while understanding that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune could make best estimates meaningless. Our four parents were still going strong in their 80s and 90s. My father, at 91, was still working as a lobbyist in the 2016 session of the Texas legislature. He’d laugh at the idea of quitting at 70. So we again filled in some rather optimistic estimates and then marched on through questions that were pretty obviously intended to measure my tolerance for investment risk: whether I was likely to sell stocks in a market downturn (no), whether I would invest in a fund based on a casual conversation or tip (heck, no), and suchlike.

Then came another stumper: What percentage of our income would we hope to receive in retirement? Searching through financial websites, I found that many people look for about 70 or 80 percent of their working income in retirement. The assumption is that retirees will live less expensively than they did in their more active years. So once again, I plugged in yet another guess, based on yet another rule of thumb that I hadn’t known moments before.

As Jeanne and I discussed these things, I realized we had never really talked about whatever passed for my investment strategy. I offered to describe mine, such as it is. But she cut me off, saying, My strategy is not to know your strategy.

I was gratified by her level of trust in me but wondered whether it was justified. And whether she was just trying to shut me up. Still, I did my best to express my amorphous thoughts on investing. I explained that I’d been skeptical of financial advice programs about hardcore investing by gurus like Jim Cramer. I never felt that I was the kind of guy who could beat the market. That’s how I came up with my laissez-faire approach. I had a hard time remembering how much of my income I had assigned to the funds 14 years before, when I came to the Times. (After doing some research, I discovered that it was 10 percent, the same portion of my income I’d maintained during my years at Newsweek and The Washington Post.)

Jeanne said, I approve. Which, after more than 40 years together, is nice to hear.

Proceeding through the questionnaire, I then had to track down what we could expect to receive from Social Security each month at age 70—a pretty easy figure to find from ssa.gov—and what my various pensions might bring in. That process could not be handled from my easy chair, as I had to ask former employers to come up with estimates. One would answer during the course of a single phone call; the other took weeks to calculate an estimate and send it by mail. Anticipating a slog, I decided I’d had enough for the night.

When I shut my laptop, four hours had passed from the time I had started the survey, and I was far from done. But we were thinking about the right questions at last.

The next day, Jeanne sent me an email mentioning a conversation she’d had with a coworker who had asked a quality-of-life question. If you wait until you are 70 to retire, you might get a bigger payout, but will you be in any condition to enjoy it?

I responded: An excellent question. If 70 is the new 50, yes. If 70 is the old 70, no.

Our parents, as I said, had been very young 70-year-olds. It seemed like a safe bet. But I decided to ask the counselor to look at the numbers under a couple of different retirement ages.

Over the next few days, I gathered the final bits of information about what my pensions from various employers would amount to and finished the form. Soon after that, Vanguard came back with a report generated from my answers. It said I should be more heavily invested in bonds; considering my age, the report stated, I had too much money in stocks. Vanguard’s quarterly mailings had been telling me that for a while, so this advice was no surprise. But then I saw words that seemed to levitate off the page:

You’re on track to meet your retirement goals.

It was a beautiful thing. If we continued the way we were going, if the financial markets didn’t collapse, if the magical fairies that govern employment and health were good to us, we would make it. I was, frankly, surprised. Jeanne was exultant. She said, We won’t be eating cat food!

But, of course, there were uncertainties. The document from Vanguard presented three scenarios for my portfolio over time, based on past U.S. market performance: best, average, and worst. The worst-case scenario left us with $800,000, well below what we’d need for a comfortable draw-down from our 401(k) in retirement. The best-case was ridiculously high: nearly $4 million. The average scenario put us at about $2 million, which should make for a comfortable retirement. But which will it be? There’s no way to tell. It’s still a game of if, if, if.

A week later, I had the conversation with the financial adviser, an upbeat guy named Greg. We discussed how to get on what he somewhat ominously called the glide path to a more balanced portfolio for retirement.

He explained that the allocation between stocks and bonds mentioned in the report was actually a big deal—the most important one you make as an investor, even bigger than deciding what funds we invest in, since bonds help cushion your investments against stock market drops. When things are bad, your drops are not as extreme. So your recovery doesn’t have to be as extreme, he said. I didn’t have a lot of my money in bonds; the recommended percentage at my age (and considering my aptitude for risk from the questions I’d answered) was about 35 percent in bonds and 65 percent in stocks. I told him that I’d take a hard look at shifting the balance toward more bonds.

He also wanted to talk about some of the mutual funds I’d been invested in since starting to save 30 years before, and noted that several of them were funds run by fund managers and based on research in the markets, with higher rates than I would pay if I put more of my assets into so-called index funds, which are based on market indexes like the Standard & Poor 500. While much of my portfolio was already in such an index fund, he explained that I could make more money by putting more of my assets into lower-fee index funds. The report from Vanguard had recommended a number of index funds the company offers that focus on large companies, midsize companies, and international companies. It all went by pretty fast, but I caught most of it.

He didn’t push me on any of these proposed changes—he told me that I could shift the assets myself, when I was ready, from my home computer. The report that Vanguard had generated recommended some of those funds, and I could use those or find others, he said. Most important, changing funds within Vanguard would cost me nothing—no asset-transfer fees, he said. Sweet!

He also explained what we could expect if I wanted to shorten my time working and retire in my 60s. His estimates put us a little closer to the margins—less travel, buying cheaper cuts of meat—but he suggested that our current portfolio could, barring ill fortune, deliver us to comfort if not prosperity.

It felt good to be done.

But we weren’t, of course. This was only the beginning. We plugged a bunch of hypothetical numbers into a model and got a nice picture back. Much was still left to chance. Every decision led to others, and opening one door led to even more doors. I would have to make decisions about whether to buy more bonds and whether to move more of our assets into index funds. And beyond our retirement planning, we still had so much to do to be able to say we’d gotten our financial life in order. We still did not have a will. I still needed to look at my level of life insurance to make sure the family would be covered if that bus found me. And there were things like medical directives: if either of us became incapacitated, under what circumstances would we want someone to pull the plug, and then what to do with our potentially useful organs?